Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

This paper considers Professor Beckerman's view that the depletion of natural resources and the pollution of the environment create no serious threat of social disruption; pose problems which are either self-regulating or easily solved by pricing policies; and require no original thought for the understanding of the politico-economic problems involved. It is argued that Beckerman's views rest on a number of unstated acts of faith regarding the working of the politico-economic system, these being crucial to his conclusions but unsupported by his arguments.

This paper illustrates how the concept of activity analysis can be used to construct general frameworks for descriptive urban models. There is a brief introduction to the activity analysis and the representation of a multisector production-consumption system. This is followed by examples of the use of the framework with two spatial-allocation models—a singly-constrained retail model and a version of the Lowry model. These models generate coefficients within a general activity-commodity table. One insight provided by the framework is the ‘dual’ model. This provides a set of system indicators for use in the evaluation of projects which are fully consistent with the implied production and consumption system represented by the spatial-allocation model.

Maps of the intraurban residential preferences of a large sample of respondents in the Los Angeles metropolitan area are presented as an alternate way of viewing intraurban space. Some technical problems associated with the analysis of residential preferences are discussed, and an income constraint is introduced as an integral part of the analysis. The results suggest that it is possible to present a meaningful map of the urban area in terms of residential preferences, and that the preference patterns displayed by minority groups indicate the importance of ethnic ties.

This is the second of three papers which describe a model of housing demand, using data from the town of Reading, Berkshire. The first paper sets out the theoretical framework for the model. This second paper documents the results for housing price indices and implicit prices for housing services, or characteristics, such as accessibility to employment and to schools, floor space, age, storey height, and number of garages. The third paper contains results for housing demand equations at three levels of aggregation, and for the real annual costs paid for similar housing in different tenure groups. The research is concerned with ways of obtaining information which is directly relevant to cost-benefit analysis in urban planning, information concerning what are urban services, the relative prices for the services, and the types of environments that produce these services. While the empirical work is restricted by the available data to a cross-section study of demand, the approach might be usefully applied to all types of urban analyses which involve evaluation.

The set of technical procedures commonly known as factorial ecology acts on a correlation matrix and so is based on variables standardised to the common base of zero mean and unit variance. This, according to the present note, is wasteful of the information on the data matrix being analysed. Alternative input matrices, to be treated as complementary to the correlation matrix, are suggested. These comprise firstly measures of variance-covariance, and secondly measures of the cross-products. Several examples of small data sets are used to illustrate the interpretative advantages of these matrices. No firm conclusions are offered, since further research is needed and unresolved problems still exist, but the possible extensions offered to the factorial ecology method seem worthy of serious consideration.

One general response by firms to competitive pressures in technologically dynamic economies is the search within an industry and/or its linked industries for alternative or improved best-practice techniques. The extent of the search for new techniques and subsequent patterns of adoption and adaption are dependent on differential and changing intra- and inter-industry innovative activities. Some plants and firms are more successful at incorporating best-practice technology, achieve higher levels of productivity performance, and attain the status of best-practice enterprises. These enterprises may also assume the role of technical leaders and foster further changes and improvements in the technology of the industry. This article examines first the origins of best-practice technology in an industry, and the nature and evolutionary patterns of technical leadership. This is followed by a consideration of the regional growth impacts and development implications of different evolutionary conditions.

This paper presents a model of the location of agricultural production. The price of output, the location of production, and the density of population are determined by the assumption of an equilibrium of exchange between the city service industry and its surrounding agricultural hinterland. The demand and supply of transport and the allocation of population to urban and rural occupations are also determined within the model.